Paul Feyerabend and the Dialectical Character of Quantum Mechanics: A Lesson in Philosophical Dadaism

ABSTRACT

In 1966, Paul Feyerabend published a short essay on the relation between dialectical materialist philosophy and Niels Bohr’s quantum theory, in which he develops several provocative ideas about the relations between science, ideology and society. I use Feyerabend’s essay to construct an account of his ‘Dadaist’ philosophical methodology. I argue that Dadaism is an ironic form of intellectual seriousness, such that the Dadaist is prepared to take any idea or practice seriously as a potentially valuable contribution to collective human thought and action (despite any diverging personal convictions), especially if they find such engagement to be lacking in their local culture. I identify a weakness in Feyerabend’s formulation of Dadaism, so far as it is conceived as a matter of individual epistemic character and thus fails to account for the role of the social structure of intellectual activity. This weakness can be remedied by supplementing philosophical Dadaism with descriptions of the kinds of institutions and incentive structures that might cultivate its constitutive epistemic dispositions.

KEYWORDS:

• Paul Feyerabend
• dialectical materialism
• quantum theory
• dadaism

Introduction: The Emergence of Feyerabendianism

Scholars have already established that the 1960s was a period of great change for Paul Feyerabend’s philosophy of science. It is in this decade that Feyerabend gradually detached himself from the Popperian school of critical rationalism (though it undoubtedly left its mark on his thinking) and in which the historicism, radical pluralism and anti-scientism with which he is most strongly associated came into sharper focus (Collodel 2016; Kuby 2021, 132–133). In short, this is the period in which something worthy of the name ‘Feyerabendianism’ emerged.

In 1966, the US journal Slavic Review (henceforth SR) published a short, peculiar, and hitherto underdiscussed article by Feyerabend, titled ‘Dialectical Materialism and the Quantum Theory’. In as few as four pages, Feyerabend develops several substantive and characteristically provocative ideas, not only about dialectical materialism and its relation to Niels Bohr’s distinctive approach to quantum theory, but also about the wider relations between scientific practice, philosophical ideology and society. Despite (or perhaps due to) its extravagance, my impression is that many readers of Feyerabend treat the SR article (if they have even read it) to be little more than a curiosity – a whimsical but ultimately uninteresting essay (philosophically speaking), one that warrants relatively little attention compared to his longer, more considered studies in quantum theory. However, as I hope to demonstrate here, there is more than meets the eye in Feyerabend’s brief foray into debates surrounding Marxist philosophy and scientific practice.

The first goal of this essay is to undertake a close reading of the SR article and to add an additional layer of texture to the story of Feyerabend’s philosophical development in the 1960s. I argue that it is in this period that, alongside the above hallmarks of Feyerabendianism, his philosophical ‘Dadaism’ begins presenting itself as a core methodological feature of his philosophy, and that the SR article is demonstrative of this shift in practice. In so doing, I clarify what philosophical Dadaism consists in: it is not, as one might be inclined to think given the artistic metaphor, just a presentational feature of Feyerabend’s philosophy, one that might be reducible to a stylistic use of humour or polemic; rather it is a substantive mode of philosophical inquiry characterised, somewhat ironically, by a form of intellectual seriousness. The philosophical Dadaist is prepared to take seriously, at least on a provisional basis, any position, idea or practice that arises out of the abundance of human intellectual activity, regardless of their own previously articulated or deeply held commitments, and to put those positions, etc., into dialogue with other, seemingly incompatible views as part of experimentations in thought. This is not an entirely arbitrary practice, however: the Dadaist is especially keen to take seriously those positions with which they find there to be little engagement in their local intellectual culture; thus, philosophical Dadaism is a politically responsive methodology and apiece with Feyerabend’s apparent anti-chauvinist ethic.

A related aim of this paper is to encourage readers of Feyerabend to reassess the significance of his non-standard engagements with certain intellectual traditions (‘non-standard’ according to the disciplinary norms of twentieth-century, academic philosophy of science, that is). The case in point is his sympathetic treatment of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, as providing a coherent methodology for scientific practice (or a close enough approximation, as we shall see). Given his Dadaism, it has become something of a truism among Feyerabend scholars that his engagements with certain traditions ought not to be taken as reflections of his personal convictions; rather, they should be read as rhetorical devices in aid of some other argument (or, in certain cases, as attempts to provoke strong affective reactions in his readers). I am concerned that this has given some readers licence to dismiss or ignore controversial aspects of Feyerabend’s writings altogether – for instance, no one has yet devoted serious attention to understanding why Feyerabend was so laudatory of Lenin’s historical and philosophical writings (which is noteworthy since the latter are not well-regarded among many academic philosophers), beyond the rather shallow suggestion that it is a tactic in provocation. Such dismissals, I think, betray a poor understanding of the methodological significance of Feyerabend’s philosophical Dadaism; in fact, I believe that they take the opposite lesson to that which Feyerabend was attempting to hammer home to his readers. In opting for the Dadaist approach, Feyerabend hopes to encourage his readers to develop certain epistemic dispositions, namely openness, humility and readiness, i.e., those that are necessary for what Ian James Kidd calls ‘epistemically responsible citizenship’ (Kidd 2016). As such, the appropriate response to reading provocative passages in Feyerabend’s writings is to allow oneself to be provoked, to open oneself up to unfamiliar ideas in the hopes that they might offer something unexpected of value.

The programme for the rest of this essay is as follows. First, I describe Feyerabend’s broader engagements with Marxists and their philosophy. This will not amount to a complete history of that relationship; my intention is to dispel the idea that Feyerabend’s commentary on the dialectical materialist account of quantum theory is merely an isolated act of provocation made at the height of the Cold War; rather, it is in keeping with hisextensive (albeit uneven and ultimately ambivalent) intellectual interest in Marxism. Next, I turn to the central task of the essay by undertaking a close reading of the SR article, elaborating what I take to be its central lessons regarding the relations between science, ideology, and society. Then, I build on these reflections to articulate a wider account of the nature and purpose of philosophical Dadaism, pre-emptively addressing some likely points of confusion. In the final section, I identify what I take to be a major weakness of Feyerabend’s formulation of Dadaism, namely his inattention to the social structures that might cultivate the kinds of epistemic dispositions that are constitutive of a Dadaist mode of inquiry.

Feyerabend’s Engagements with Marxism

Upon scanning Feyerabend’s references to Marxism across his writings, one finds that he is prepared to both criticise and praise the tradition and its practitioners. This ambivalence is by no means remarkable: post-war academic philosophers, especially those within or adjacent to the analytic tradition, are rarely forthcoming with explicitly partisan attitudes (in either direction) about Marxist theory and politics, at least in scholarly writing (there are, of course, reasons for this besides the actual political commitments of such philosophers, especially for those living under McCarthyistic culture of the United States during the Cold War). However, when one pays closer attention to the claims Feyerabend actually makes about Marxism, one finds a dappled tapestry of views, demonstrating a considered engagement with the tradition. Moreover, this engagement falls against a background of personal relationships that Feyerabend fostered with a handful of European Marxist intellectuals, which, according to his own accounts, shaped his thinking in important ways.

Chief among these relationships appears to be Feyerabend’s friendship with the Austrian philosopher, public educator and psychoanalyst, Walter Hollitscher, whom he met shortly after his first appearance at the Austrian College Society in 1948 (Feyerabend 1995, 71–72). Feyerabend partly attributes his ‘conversion’ away from positivism, and towards (his admittedly unorthodox and dynamic) realism to discussions he had with Hollitscher about philosophy and scientific practice:

Hollitscher never presented an argument that would lead, step by step, from positivism into realism and would have regarded the attempt to produce such an argument as philosophical folly. He rather developed the realist position itself, illustrated by examples from science and commonsense, showed how closely it was connected with scientific research and everyday action and so revealed its strength. … Hollitscher did not raise semantic points, or points of method, as a critical rationalist might have done, he continue to discuss concrete cases until I felt rather foolish with my abstract objections. For I saw how closely realism was connected with facts, procedures, principles I value and that it had helped to bring them about while positivism merely described the results in a rather complicated way after they had been found … . (Feyerabend 1978, 113)

Hollitscher’s influence on Feyerabend is noteworthy for an additional reason: philosophical arguments grounded by references to concrete cases of scientific practice became a central feature of Feyerabend’s philosophy after the 1960s, amounting to his (eventual) participation in the ‘historical turn’ in philosophy of science (Kuby 2021, 132–133). Note also that this attentiveness to concrete human practices, as opposed to speculative images of human thought, is a paradigmatic (though perhaps not universal) feature of Marxist theorisation, motivated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ early criticisms of then-dominant Hegelian philosophy. In this sense, the influence that Hollitscher had on Feyerabend’s thought is a characteristically Marxian one.

It is further worth noting what Feyerabend says about his reading of Marxist-Leninist writings before his conversations with Hollitscher:

When starting to discuss with Hollitscher I was a raving positivist, I favoured strict rules of research and had only a pitying smile for the three basic principles of dialectics which I read in Stalin’s little pamphlet on dialectical and historical materialism. (Feyerabend 1978, 112)

But after these discussions, he reports a change in attitude:

While I accepted realism I did not accept dialectics and historical materialism – my predilection for abstract argument (another positivist hangover) was still too strong for that. Today Stalin’s rules seem to me preferable by far to the complicated and epicycle-ridden standards of our modern friends of reason. (113)

As we shall see in my analysis of the SR article, we have some reasons to believe that Feyerabend developed his understanding of dialectical methodology off the back of the ‘rules’ in Stalin’s pamphlet.

Through Hollitscher Feyerabend met several other Marxists, including the composer of the East German national anthem, Hanns Eisler, and the poet and playwright, Bertolt Brecht, both of whom had been exiled by the Nazi Party in the 1930s dueto their socialist political and artistic activities (Feyerabend 1995, 73). I do not know the extent of Eisler’s impact on Feyerabend’s thought; however, it is clear that Brecht’s aesthetic practice greatly shaped Feyerabend’s attitude to philosophy. Briefly, Brecht’s distinctive dramaturgical style, ‘epic theatre’, is a form of didactic theatre, in which dramatic irony, humour, song and minimalist production design are used to raise audience’s collective consciousness to the social-political ideas under representation (typically regarding the decadence and distorted character of bourgeois culture), and to encourage members to reflect on and develop critical (and typically proletarian) attitudes towards those ideas (Brecht 1964). The theoretical centrepiece of this practice is the concept of Verfremdungeffekt (‘distancing effect’ or ‘alienation effect’): by representing dramas in a strange, non-naturalistic form, Brecht intends to alienate the audience from the lives and personalities of the characters (in direct contrast to the then-dominant naturalistic style, pioneered by Konstantin Stanislavski), such that their attention is drawn instead to the social-political messaging of the play. As John Preston has noted, Brecht’s aesthetic practice influenced Feyerabend to a significant degree, not least in shaping his theatrical, bombastic style and his tendency to represent his ideas as ‘collages’ rather than as a linear ‘train of reasoning’ (Preston 1999, 10). Feyerabend even wrote an essay on the theatre as a medium for ideology-critique (a staple of Marxist criticism), one that is more advanced than either philosophy or the sciences:

[T]he arts of the twentieth century have gone much further in the criticism of customary modes of thought than have both the sciences and the various critical philosophies which exist today. Moreover, they have not only developed an abstract principle of criticism, they have also studied the psychological conditions under which criticism can be expected to become effective. (Feyerabend 1967, 298)

Feyerabend uses the theoretical writings of the Romanian-French playwright, Eugène Ionesco as a case in point, remarking that the latter’s practice closely resembles that of Brecht (299). That said, Feyerabend later implies that his views moved away from Brecht’s didacticism, insofar as he prefers that

the choice [of moral or political lesson] must be left to the audience. The playwright presents characters and tells a story. If he errs it should be on the side of sympathy for his scoundrels, for circumstances and suffering play as large a role in the creation of evil and evil intentions as do those intentions themselves, and the general tendency is to emphasize the latter. The playwright (and his colleague, the teacher) must not try to anticipate the decision of the audience (of the pupils) or replace it by a decision of his own if they should tum out to be incapable of making up their own minds. Under no circumstances must he try to be a ‘moral force’. A moral force, whether for good or for evil, turns people into slaves and slavery, even slavery in the service of The Good, or of God Himself, is the most abject condition of all. This is how I see the situation today. However, it took me a long time before I arrived at this view. (Feyerabend 2010, 266)

This notional anti-didacticism naturally accords with Feyerabend’s critical stance on expert authority in would-be democratic societies – though, as Matthew J. Brown has demonstrated, that stance is not without its internal difficulties (Brown 2021). In any case, I agree with Chiara Ambrosio that more work can and should be done in examining the Brecht-Feyerabend relation, and in developing its lessons for philosophers of science (Ambrosio 2021, 39).

Aside from these interpersonal relationships, Feyerabend engages with the Marxist intellectual tradition in his academic prose. He praises twentieth-century socialist politicians, especially Lenin, for his apparently robust understanding of the history and philosophy of scientific practices; indeed, Against Method opens with a long quotation from Lenin’s Left-wing Communism (Feyerabend mixes this quotation with others from G.W.F. Hegel and Herbert Butterfield), on the complex nature of real history, which motivates Feyerabend’s call for a historically informed, pluralistic philosophy of science (Feyerabend 2010, 1–2; Lenin 1970, 82). Marx and Leon Trotsky are also cited positively for their theorisation of the ‘uneven’ character of historical development, which is reflected in Feyerabend’s own conception of the historical character of scientific knowledge (106n). He also praises (unnamed) Chinese communists at some length for their resistance to ‘scientific chauvinism’ through the introduction of ‘traditional Chinese medicine’ into public health programmes, leading to a ‘duality’ of views being made possible (Feyerabend 2010, 30–31, 167; see Shaw 2021 for useful philosophical analysis of Feyerabend’s treatment of the case of traditional Chinese medicine). It is clear that Feyerabend saw, even if only for communicative purposes, some parallels between his historicist, pluralist account of science and some of the theoretical ideas and political actions of certain Marxists.

However, when it comes to contemporary Marxist intellectuals, Feyerabend is much more critical. As a group, he frequently lumps ‘the Marxists’ in with ‘liberals’ and ‘rationalists’ in derisions of intellectuals whom he takes to have problematically monistic and absolutist conceptions of human epistemic activity. Occasionally, he will name particular Marxist thinkers, such as Louis Althusser, whom he charges with a ‘childlike’ acceptance of scientific authority (Feyerabend 1975, 177). In private correspondence with Imre Lakatos, he berated the ‘New Left’ (specifically those working at the publishing house then known as New Left Books, now as Verso) as ‘a bunch of constipated academics who have hardly anything in common with either Marx, or Lenin, or Mao’ (Lakatos, Feyerabend, and Motterlini 1999, 294). By far, his most extensive critical engagement with Marxists is his scathing response to a 1977 review of Against Method by Jean Curthoys and Wallis Suchting (Feyerabend 1978, 154–182; Curthoys and Suchting 1977). Very briefly, Curthoys and Suchting criticise Feyerabend for the ‘liberalism’ and ‘empiricism’ of his epistemological anarchism, which they take to be in conflict with the Marxist view of scientific knowledge. A close reading of this is exchange is outside the scope of this paper, but the following from Feyerabend’s response is relevant to my aims in this essay:

Marxism is not just an inventory of phrases, it is a philosophy and it demands from its practitioners a little more than a pure heart, strong lungs, and a good memory. It demands from them an ability to recognize an opponent, to separate him from other opponents, it demands a nose for differences that might seem insignificant when compared with the ‘great questions of the time’, which in turn demands an ability to read and understand what is said. (Feyerabend 1978, 155)

As well as recapitulating his common complaint against his critics (namely that they have fundamentally failed to understand the position he developed in Against Method), Feyerabend is here demanding of his critics a greater intellectual seriousness, not only with regards to his arguments but with regards to their own tradition. Keeping this demand in mind will be important for my account of philosophical Dadaism in Section 4.

In summary of this brief survey of Feyerabend’s engagements with Marxism: he is ultimately ambivalent about the tradition, being himself neither a Marxist nor an out-and-out anti-Marxist; rather, he is a non-Marxist whose thought has been shaped by engagements with Marxism in several ways. What I hope to have shown here, in any case, is that Feyerabend’s foray into debates about dialectical materialism and scientific practice is not an isolated, whimsical act of provocation but forms part of his wider interest in Marxist philosophy and its relation to his own ideas. With this in mind, I turn to the task of taking seriously the SR article as an intervention into questions about the relations between scientific practice, ideology, and society.

Reading Feyerabend’s ‘Dialectical Materialism and the Quantum Theory’

In the opening passages of the SR article, we get some (slightly veiled) indications as to Feyerabend’s motivations for discussing dialectical materialism in relation to Bohr’s quantum theory:

The discussion, or even the mere description, of procedures and events in a society whose basic principles are not generally accepted is always a touchy matter. Too often the difficulties of the subject described and the quite natural errors made by those developing it further are projected onto the unloved ideology and regarded as clear proofs of its weakness and insufficiency. Studies of the historical developments of dialectical materialism and attempts to evaluate the influence of its philosophy invariably suffer from this effect. They also suffer from the ignorance of their authors on scientific matters and from their primitive philosophy of science. (Feyerabend 1966, 414)

Thus, Feyerabend is intervening into these debates because he perceives three deficiencies in the existing literature, at least in the Western academy: an ideological bias against Marxist philosophy, a poor understanding of technical-scientific material and an insufficient philosophy of science. He lists (unfortunately without proper citations) several authors whose work he takes to suffer from one of these deficiencies, despite their otherwise valuable scholarship: the Austrian historian Gustav Wetter, the Polish logician Jósef Maria Bocheński, the Hungarian critical theorist György Lukács and the US historian Loren Graham.

His remark on Graham’s account of the history of Soviet science leads him to articulate a second motivation for the essay, related to the aforementioned criticism of Western academic philosophy of science. Graham’s account, he says ‘may be read … as an indirect plea for leaving pure science entirely to itself’, constructing an image of the proper relationship between science and society that Feyerabend wants to do away with. Modern science, Feyerabend tells us, is ‘too important’ to be left to scientists and thus, there is an imperative for it to be ‘examined and criticized’ by politicians – presumably, as people who hold (or at least ought to hold) the interests of society at large in mind when conduction such examinations (414–415). Thus, the discussion of the relation between dialectical materialism (a standard but by no means ubiquitous philosophical and methodological framework for Marxist theorising) and quantum mechanics (a recognisably successful network of scientific theories by the 1960s) is a case-study into the plausibility of an alternative conception of the science-society relation, in which ideologies (in the hands of politicians, citizens and other agents of political society) might have a substantive role to play in framing and regulating scientific inquiry.

Feyerabend proceeds to offer an interpretation of the methodological content of dialectical materialist philosophy. He tells us that it falls short of amounting to a ‘systematic philosophy’ (it is not yet sufficiently developed) but nonetheless provides a ‘coherent point of view’ that can frame scientists’ research practices. Feyerabend lists five ‘pieces’ that can be ‘united’ into this point of view. Paraphrasing, these are: (i) a view of nature according to which everything is related; (ii) an emphasis on the existence and importance of discontinuities; (iii) a fallibilist conception of scientific knowledge, according to which it has an approximate character; (iv) a demand to unite theory and practice; and (v) the recognition of conceptual change during the historical development of knowledge. From these pieces, he derives two additional ideas, namely that we ought to ‘take the results of experimental practice seriously … but to be aware of the limits of all generalizations’ and that ‘no part of our knowledge is ever exempt from change and that it is futile to base eternal truths on conceptual considerations’ (415).

Feyerabend does not tell us in this article from where he receives this image of dialectical materialist methodology. However, as I noted in Section 2, we know that he read Stalin’s pamphlet ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, in which the author elaborates on the official philosophical worldview of the Soviet Union. Stalin lists his own set of principles united under the name of ‘the dialectical method’, which (again, paraphrased) are: (a) that nature is a connected and integral whole; (b) that nature is in a state of constant motion and change; (c) that imperceptible quantitative changes naturally lead to fundamental qualitative changes (note that this is also identified by Engels as one of the three ‘laws of dialectics’); and (d) that internal contradictions are inherent in nature (Stalin 1949, 4–7; Engels 2012, 63–64). There is an immediately obvious correspondence between piece (i) and principle (a), and, if we interpret Feyerabend’s ‘discontinuities’ as a redescription of ‘fundamental qualitative changes’, then piece (ii) is partly captured in principle (c). Piece (iv), on demand for unity of theory and practice, is not listed by Stalin as a specific principle of dialectical methodology; however, he remarks that ‘the bond between science and practical activity, between theory and practice, their unity, should be the guiding start of the party of the proletariat’ (15). Otherwise, there remains a discrepancy between Feyerabend’s pieces and Stalin’s principles: Feyerabend does not discuss the view that nature is in constant motion, nor does he mention natural contradictions (one of the theoretical centrepieces of Marxist philosophy), nor too does Stalin describe a fallibilistic conception of scientific knowledge.

Is Feyerabend thus engaging in post-Soviet ‘revisionism’ (a common accusation among Marxist after Marx) in his account of dialectical materialist methodology? The fact his ‘point of view’ departs from Stalin’s more substantive methodology does not, I think, substantiate such a charge. We know that Feyerabend also read Lenin’s (much maligned, among academic philosophers of science) Materialism and Empiro-criticism, another authoritative text of Soviet philosophy and his Philosophical Notebooks (which, in the SR article, Feyerabend praises for displaying Lenin’s acquaintance with contemporary science and his ‘philosophical intuition’) (Feyerabend 1966, 414). As Joe Pateman argues, in both texts Lenin places emphasis on the historically dynamic and thereby approximate nature of human cognition, which he takes to be part of the Marxian view (Pateman 2019). In Materialism, he claims:

The materialist dialectics of Marx and Engels certainly does contain relativism, but is not reducible to relativism, that is, it recognises the relativity of all our knowledge, not in the sense of denying objective truth, but in the sense that the limits of approximation of our knowledge to this truth are historically conditioned. (Lenin 1972, 154)

And, in a comment on Hegel’s Science of Logic in the Notebooks, he remarks:

Knowledge is the reflection of nature by man. But this is not simple, not an immediate, not a complete reflection, but the process of a series of abstractions, the formation and development of concepts, laws, etc., and these concepts, laws, etc., (thought, science = “the logical Idea”) embrace conditionally, approximately, the universal, law-governed character of eternally moving and developing nature. (Lenin 1977, 182)

Hence it is plausible that Feyerabend extracts his understanding of the dialectical materialist emphasis on the fallibility of scientific knowledge and on the dynamic, conditional nature of our conceptual systems from Lenin’s texts. This, then, takes care of the possible origins of pieces (iii) and (iv) in Feyerabend’s account – or at least shows that these pieces remain within the bounds of Soviet interpretations of Marxist methodology.

For readers who are inclined to worry that the above image of dialectical materialist methodology brushes over the real history of Soviet science and its relationship to political administration (as is usually exemplified by customary accounts of the ‘Lysenko affair’, such as they are), let me say this: none of Feyerabend’s arguments in the SR article, as we shall see, depend on actual attempts to implement dialectical materialism in the context of concrete scientific practices (how could they? Bohr’s quantum theory was not in fact motivated by any dialectical materialist commitments, after all!). Feyerabend is instead providing a ‘just so’ story of how dialectical materialist ideas could very well have shaped Bohr’s approach to quantum mechanics (or something sufficiently like it), given – as seen below – that philosophical ideas resembling pieces of dialectical materialism actually did shape it. All this is to resist the image of the science-society relation set up by Graham, according to which philosophical or ideological material has no place in ‘pure’ scientific practice.

With this account of the dialectical materialist point of view in hand, Feyerabend turns to the topic of its relation to Bohr’s quantum theory. He briefly sketches the correspondence between Bohr’s (pre-1924) approach to quantum theory and dialectical materialist methodology:

All the research done in Copenhagen before 1924 was aimed at finding a new theory of atomic processes (realism). In this attempt one tried to locate, and to isolate, those parts of the practice of classical physics that still led to correct predictions, and it was hoped that a new and coherent account of the atomic level might one day emerge from the mass of experimental material, if combined with these remnants of classical physics. The relation to concrete physical practice was therefore always very close, as was the realization of the essential limitations inherent in the classical framework, or, for that matter, in any other framework, of thought. The need for a more elastic handling of the classical concepts was emphasized again and again. … And note that we are here talking not about the end products but about the manner in which theories were developed out of problems and theoretical results. (Feyerabend 1966, 415–416)

Here he is spelling out (perhaps a little too swiftly) the sense in which Bohr’s approach mirrors pieces of the dialectical materialist point of view and their implications. This approach, in Feyerabend’s view, operates under the assumption that scientific knowledge is inescapably fallible, since it is conditioned by at what are at best partially successful conceptual ‘frameworks’; that we ought to handle framework-relative concepts ‘elastically’, given their limitations; and that scientific theorisation ought to relate closely to concrete empirical practices, paying close (but by no means unreflective or unmediated) attention to experimental results. No explicit comment is made here about whether Bohr’s approach and the relational account of nature; however, in an earlier paper on quantum theory, Feyerabend states that

Bohr maintains that all state descriptions of quantum mechanical systems are relations between the systems and measuring devices in action and are therefore dependent upon the existence of other systems suitable for carrying out the measurement. (Feyerabend 1962, 217)

Thus, Bohr’s view bears resemblance to (Feyerabend’s reconstruction of) the dialectical materialist point of view.

On my best guess, given his much more comprehensive examinations (and re-examinations) of Bohr’s quantum theory across his previously published work, as well as the fact that the primary subject matter of Slavic Review is not the history of physics, Feyerabend feels at liberty to refrain from filling in the details of the above account; so, let me colour this picture a little more, with help from Daniel Kuby (Feyerabend 1958; Feyerabend 1961; Feyerabend 1962; Feyerabend 1964). The elastic handling of frameworks to which Feyerabend credits Bohr is expressed by the latter’s indeterminateness hypothesis, and its generalisation through the principle of complementarity. As Kuby explains in his robust analysis of Feyerabend’s developing account of Bohr’s quantum theory (with which I strongly encourage readers to familiarise themselves), the indeterminateness of state descriptions, that is, the physical hypothesis, supported by empirical investigation, that descriptions of a quantum system in classical terms are incomplete, motivates a generally ‘more liberal’ methodological handling of classical concepts (complementarity) in order for their theories to agree with experimental results. So far as it is restricted to the further development of one set of microphysical theories among an ocean of alternatives, Feyerabend supports Bohr’s extension of indeterminateness from a merely physical hypothesis to the methodological principle of complementarity. However, Feyerabend rejects an out-and-out methodological monism, according to which complementarity becomes a restriction on any and all future microphysical theories (Kuby 2021, 140–144).

Feyerabend goes on to claim that, after the Bohr-Kramers-Slater (BKS) theory (an acausal and non-photonic theory of interactions between atoms and radiation) was refuted by Walther Bothe and Hans Geiger’s 1925 experiments, Bohr’s ‘point of view ceased to affect actual research but became more and more an apology for the basic features of commonly accepted quantum theory’ (Kragh 1999, 153, 161; Feyerabend 1966, 416). But he also suggests that this is not sufficient to warrant rejecting Bohr’s views as wholly deviating from a dialectical materialism-like approach, since he continued to adhere to versions of pieces (i) and (v), and, what’s more, the explicit incorporation of the observer and their instruments in the quantum system provides ‘objective criteria for the implications of the fact that in theorizing we are restricted by our own (material) organisation’ (416–417). Marxists have their own language for describing what has changed about Bohr’s views: they have ceased to be ‘scientific’ and become ‘dogmatic’ or ‘metaphysical’ (insofar as they ceased to be responsive to concrete scientific practices and their experimental outputs), despite retaining some semblance to pieces of the dialectical materialist view. This assessment reflects broader judgements that Feyerabend makes in an earlier paper on Bohr’s interpretation, in which he criticises its ‘dogmatic elements’; Feyerabend argues that Bohr and his followers came to insist that their interpretation was based on such general and well-established assumptions that ‘any future theory must conform to them’ (Feyerabend 1961, 88–89), that is, they generalised complementarity too far and thus undermined their initially framework-relative handling of concepts.

What is the force of this analysis? As I suggested above, it is not the case that Feyerabend is suggesting that Bohr’s research in quantum mechanics was, as a matter of historical fact, actually motivated or guided by dialectical materialist thought. Instead, the illustration as to the correspondence between Bohr’s approach and dialectical materialist methodology serves as a foil against those who want to restrict any substantive traffic between ‘ideology’ and scientific activity, especially those writing out of the West during the Cold War, and who have an image of ‘Eastern’ science as problematically dominated by (Communist) ideology. The case-study is supposed to show that there are legitimate ways in which philosophical or ideological ideas can provide points of view for guiding scientific activity, whether those ideologies are explicitly articulated in the form of a more-or-less coherent methodological theory (as with Soviet descriptions of dialectical materialism) or made less explicit (as with Bohr’s views). This fits into Feyerabend’s broader understanding of the relation between science and philosophy, that is, his resistance to images of science that see it as desirable to separate empirical research from philosophical, aesthetic, political, ethical and other value-based considerations. Such a separation is neither possible nor desirable; we need such considerations to guide our research activity.

Feyerabend goes on to make some additional remarks about the nature of ‘parasitic philosophies’, that is, ‘philosophical points of view which, though not effective in research, are used afterwards for explaining the results in general terms’ (Feyerabend 1966, 416). These philosophies do not have a substantive relationship with the research activity that they aim to describe; they do not structure the methodological ideas that motivate and guide the research, but are brought in after the fact to make sense of its results. Feyerabend suggests that those who criticise quantum mechanics for its idealist character have mistaken the parasitic philosophy, that which was brought in by some thinkers to redescribe quantum theory, for the methodologically operative philosophical ideas (i.e. those ideas of Bohr’s that mirror pieces from dialectical materialist thought) that actually shaped the research activity. It not so much that Feyerabend thinks that the use of parasitic or secondary philosophies is itself illegitimate (indeed, we might think that they could be used to motivate new research themselves and thus take on a new methodologically operative character); rather, when we criticise research, we ought not make the error of taking the secondary philosophy for the methodologically operative one and thereby dismissing the research out of hand:

It is to be welcomed when ideas are taken seriously and when their general effects are carefully examined and criticised. But it is regrettable when really interesting ideas are not allowed to come to the fore and when attention is only paid to the pious afterthoughts. (Feyerabend 1966, 417)

In his closing remarks, Feyerabend makes some more explicitly geo-political reflections about the force of scientism in the West. Western philosophers, he suggests, are so awestruck by the power of science that they are only prepared to make room for philosophy in the aforementioned parasitic mode, that is, as a way to redescribe science in some favoured philosophical vocabulary. This view forgets that philosophical and ideological ideas play an operative role in scientific research, and thus, whether Western scientific philosophers like it or not, philosophy is already playing some other, typically hidden role. He makes a plea for ‘a philosophy that is bold enough to oppose the sciences’, that is, critically examine the ideological components that are swept under the rug of ‘“obvious methodological rules” or … “well established experimental facts”’ (Feyerabend 1966, 417). This, he thinks, has been provided by Ernst Mach, but is also common in ‘eastern’ countries (note the irony here, given that Mach is the subject of extensive criticism in Lenin’s Materialism). My sense is that this partly explains why Feyerabend is so praising of Lenin and Chinese communists, whom he takes to have attempted to subject (bourgeois conceptions of) science to critical scrutiny from an alternative, Marxist perspective.

On Taking Ideas Seriously: A Lesson in Philosophical Dadaism

These arguments about the relationship between scientific practice and philosophy or ideology are not, in this essay at least, what interests me most about the SR article. To be sure, these ideas are important to Feyerabend’s worldview, but he motivates and defends them much more comprehensively elsewhere, especially in his post-1970 writings. What interests me here is the sense in which the article is a demonstration in Feyerabend’s then-emergent philosophical methodology, that is, his Dadaism.

I have already dwelled for a long time in the strictly scholarly mode, but let me acknowledge what Feyerabend himself says about the disposition of the epistemological anarchist as it relates to that of the Dadaist, in his 1973 ‘Theses on Anarchism’:

Like the Dadaist … [the epistemological anarchist’s] aims remain stable, or change, as a result of argument, or of boredom, or of a conversion experience, or because he wants to impress some people, and so on. Given some aim, he may try to reach it with the help of organised groups, or alone. He may appeal to reason, or emotion. He may decide to proceed violently, or in a peaceful manner. His favourite pastime is to confuse rationalists by investing compelling reasons for unreasonable doctrines. There is no view, however ‘absurd’ or ‘immoral’, he refuses to consider or to act upon, and no method he regards as indispensable. The only thing he opposes positively and absolutely are universal standards, universal laws, universal ideas … and the behaviour they engender, though he does not deny that that it is often good policy to act as if such laws (such standards, such ideas) existed and as if he believed in them. He may approach the religious anarchist in his opposition to science, common sense, and the material world that is examined by both; he may outdo any Nobel prize winner in his vigorous defence of scientific purity. Behind all this outrage lies his conviction that man will cease to be a slave and gain a dignity that is more than an exercise in cautious conformism, only when he becomes capable of stepping outside the most fundamental convictions, including those which allegedly make him human. (Feyerabend 1999, 115)

This is (characteristically) polemical, so let me try to render Feyerabend’s thoughts a little plainer. Philosophical Dadaism, as I take it, is an approach to philosophy that is grounded in an (ironic) form of intellectual seriousness – regardless of the Dadaist’s previously articulated commitments or deeply held convictions, they are prepared to take seriously and indeed argue for any idea, standard or practice that arises out of the abundance of human thought and action. This is to say that they are: prepared to offer charitable interpretations of ideas; provisionally adopt their presuppositions in argument; derive additional commitments from them; explore their relation to other ideas or practices; develop their material further by reciprocal illumination; and motivate practical applications of them. This is not because the Dadaist is a trickster or philosophical troll (so far as my personal experience goes, the latter charge is quite common when it comes to interpretations of Feyerabend’s philosophy), but because they take seriously humanity’s collective but diverse capacities to develop useful and interesting ideas, even if such ideas might diverge from the Dadaist’s personal beliefs. In this sense, the Dadaist is humble about the status of their own commitments (or the commitments of their local intellectual culture) as the ultimately ‘correct’ view of the world and is resolutely non-dogmatic about any views they do hold at any given time (insofar as they are willing to entertain that alternative views might have something to offer). This is not to say that the Dadaist has no commitments, but rather that they (1) are prepared to revise those commitments in light of further investigation (including through dialogue with others) and (2) find value in explorations in thought, even in cases where they ultimately have no lasting impact on their personal views. More than this, the Dadaist is a politically responsive inquirer, as is demonstrated by Feyerabend’s investigation of dialectical materialism, insofar as they make choices about which specific ideas to take seriously against the background of their local intellectual culture: if they find an idea is not being engaged with by their peers with a satisfying level of seriousness, they will intervene by offering a charitable interpretation of it, as a corrective measure.

Thus, the Dadaists’ explorations in thought are not motivated by a desire to have the final word by articulating the correct view of things (that would run counter to their humble disposition); rather, they are motivated to encourage a shift in consciousness among their local culture (to assist members of that culture in ‘stepping outside [their] most fundamental convictions'), that is, to encourage their audiences to open themselves up to unfamiliar and underappreciated sets of ideas.¹ This, in turn, is an instrument for cultivating what Kidd calls, in his reconstruction of Feyerabend’s political thought, ‘epistemically responsible citizenship’, that is, the capacity for individual citizens to responsibly and critically evaluate ideas themselves, rather than adopting them unreflectively on the basis of a hegemonic expert authority (Kidd 2016, 127).

I want to guard against a likely confusion about the concept of ‘intellectual seriousness’ that I have used to characterise Feyerabend’s Dadaism. It cannot be the case that this is to be contrasted with light-heartedness or playfulness, since these qualities are also characteristic of Feyerabend’s philosophy. Indeed, in a planned footnote to the subtitle of Against Method, which was ultimately deleted, Feyerabend describes the Dadaist attitude in a way that might, at first glance, defeat my account entirely:

When choosing the term ‘anarchism’ for my enterprise I simply followed general usage. However, anarchism, as it has been practiced in the past and as it is being practiced today by an ever increasing number of people has features which I am not prepared to support. It cares little for human lives and human happiness (except for the lives and happiness of those who belong to some special group); and it contains precisely the kind of Puritanical dedication and seriousness which I detest) … It is for this reason that I now prefer to use the term Dadaism. A Dadaist is utterly unimpressed by any serious enterprise and he smells a rat whenever people stop smiling and assume that attitude and those facial expressions which indicate that something important is about to be said. A Dadaist is convinced that a worthwhile life will arise only when we start taking things lightly and when we remove from our speech the profound but already putrid meanings it has accumulated over the centuries (‘search for truth’; ‘defence of justice’; ‘passionate concern’; etc.). A Dadaist is prepared to initiate joyful experiments even in those domains where change and experimentation seem to be out of the question … . I hope that having read the pamphlet the reader will remember me as a flippant Dadaist and not as a serious anarchist. (Lakatos, Feyerabend, and Motterlini 1999, 294–295)

Two things can be said about this. First, and as Ian Hacking points out in his introduction to the fourth edition of Against Method, this was not Feyerabend’s final word on the matter: he deleted this note after Imre Lakatos offered a criticism to the effect that (in Hacking’s words) ‘sometimes a Dadaist has to do harm when it is the lesser of two evils’ (Feyerabend 2010, xiv). Hacking goes on to explain that Dadaism should not be characterised by ‘indifference’, but rather by ‘passion’ – which I take to mean passion about human life and our capacity for joy, but also our capacity to produce interesting and investigation-worthy ideas. Second, the ‘serious enterprise[s]’ that Feyerabend is referring to in this passage are, I think, of a different sort to what I have described as the intellectually serious character of the Dadaist: Feyerabend is warry of dogmatists who take their own ideas too seriously, by presenting them as ultimate and unassailable, rather than provisional and partial guides to thought and action. I repeat that the Dadaist is ‘serious’ in the sense that they will take any idea or theory seriously as a potentially useful object of investigation, regardless of their personal convictions; not ‘serious’ in the sense of humourless, inflexible or dogmatic.

The SR article is an attempt by Feyerabend to deploy his emergent Dadaist philosophical methodology. Against a perceived background of Western intellectuals’ failure to take seriously dialectical materialist ideology, technical scientific matters or progressive views in the philosophy of science, Feyerabend offers a charitable interpretation of how dialectical materialism could be expected to motivate and guide research, illustrating the legitimacy of the influence of political and philosophical ideas on scientific practice. All this is to say that, as well as the sharpening his pluralism, historicism and anti-scientism, the 1960s saw Feyerabend’s early attempt to exercise his Dadaist approach to philosophy.

The Limits of Feyerabend’s Dadaism: The Social-Institutional Structure of Inquiry

On my reading, Feyerabendian philosophical Dadaists are motivated to intervene into local intellectual cultures that do not, at present, engage with certain ideas: those that are not taken seriously by the standard-bearers of those cultures (for ideological reasons or otherwise). Such an intervention is intended to cultivate an openness and receptiveness in its audiences, aiding them in developing a level of epistemic agency and responsibility that is at least partly independent of hegemonic epistemic cultures.

Are such interventions on behalf of individual Dadaists sufficient for cultivating epistemic agency or responsibility in their local culture? Even if the Dadaist is themselves disposed to take seriously, provisionally argue for and motivate the development unfamiliar ideas, there are no guarantees that anyone in the local culture will listen to them, and hence no guarantees that the Dadaist’s epistemic consciousness-raising goals will be achieved. There is a kind of circularity here: in order for other members of the culture to take the Dadaist’s interventions seriously, they would already need some minimum level of epistemic openness – they must already be open to having their minds changed (thus they must already approximate the disposition of the ‘true Dadaist’ to some degree)! It seems that by the time of his work on the ‘free society’, Feyerabend was aware of the need for a certain kind of disposition among its members en masse in order for them to have the necessary capacity to take alternative ideas seriously (and therefor to engage in the kinds of inter-cultural ‘open exchanges’ that make democratic decisions in pluralistic societies legitimate). Jamie Shaw discusses Feyerabend’s concept of ‘maturity’ as the virtue required of citizens of the free society:

Mature citizens are not merely open-minded and good-willed, but inform themselves about a wide variety of topics and perspectives and can mentally manage this diversity of information. This is especially important given the interconnectedness of science with values, politics, history, and other activities; science cannot be properly understood without understanding these topics as well. (Shaw 2021, S6060)

Fully-fledged ‘maturity’ looks like precisely the kind of virtue that Feyerabend’s Dadaistic approach to philosophy tries to encourage in his readers; my point here is that the philosophical Dadaist needs their audience to be at least ‘open-minded and good-willed’, if not active investigators themselves – the question of how to secure these minimal requirements is still unanswered.

My sense is that this problem arises from Feyerabend’s incomplete social philosophy, specifically his lack of a theory of social transformation. For all his insistence that philosophers should pay closer attention to the real history and anthropology of science, on the importance of intercultural exchange in shaping collective understandings of the ‘abundant world’, and on the important relations between science and other social processes, he rarely examines (except in the very abstract) questions of the social-institutional apparatus that constrain knowledge production, belief formation or policy construction – even less so what can be done to change them. For instance, he does not examine questions of academic publishing, of who currently holds power in academic publishing institutions, or from where their power arises; nor does he examine the political economy of scientific research, i.e. the distribution and circulation of financial, material, and infrastructural resources among different research communities. Shaw has begun to address the prospects of ‘de-idealizing’ Feyerabend’s social philosophy in the context of science policy construction and (following Kidd) acknowledges the importance of education and public outreach reforms, such that citizens are presented with a plurality of epistemic traditions and provided training in scientific literacy, such that they can develop their own critical assessments of ‘expert’ judgements (Shaw 2020, S6074–S6076; Kidd 2013). Shaw has also begun to extract lessons on questions of science funding policy from Feyerabend’s scattered remarks on the freedom of science and its democratic oversight (Shaw 2021).

These suggestions are welcome, and ought to be developed further; in the context of education reforms, the Feyerabend Dadaist should be motivated to engage in concrete questions of pedagogical and curriculum reform, that is, of how science and other epistemic cultures should be presented to students in classrooms (whether those are literal classrooms or not) in ways that cultivate the minimal requirements of epistemic responsibility or maturity. In the context of academic institutions, the Dadaist ought to engage with, for example, proposals to alter the incentive structures in scientific publishing by abolishing prepublication peer review, on the grounds that this will maximise opportunities for epistemically healthy inter-theoretic criticism (Heesen and Bright 2021). But beyond educational and academic institutions, the Dadaist ought to engage in processes of real-political mobilisation and organisation of citizens, members of non-hegemonic epistemic traditions, and techno-scientific labourers, in order to investigate the processes through which they might affect changes in our overall intellectual culture.

I greatly appreciate the considerable feedback from Hasok Chang, who provided important insights into the relevant literature on the history of quantum theory. I would also like to thank my two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions for further reading.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Vice-Chancellor's & King's College Scholarship: [302716355].

Notes

1 This makes some sense of Feyerabend’s choice of terminology: the early 20th-century European art movement, Dada, was in part an attempt by dissident artistic collectives to destabilise common assumptions about the function of art, the nature of the aesthetic, the relation between art and reason, etc.